Even though Instagram isn’t using this feature for ads at the moment, it has the potential to give the app more powerful targeting data

A social media strategy has always been important to align your content with your marketing goals, however in light of the recent updates an accompanying hashtag strategy is the next step if you want to increase your reach to the right people.

Here are some guidelines to help kick start your hashtag strategy…

Social Listening: Find out the trending topics within your target market

The social media landscape is a busy place, full of billions of conversations that provide valuable market insight and social listening can help you to identify key topics of conversation that are of high interest to your target market.

This will offer insight into what your customers and the people who you want to become your customers are talking about – giving you the upper hand on your hashtag strategy.

To make it easier, there are many tools such as Mention available to do the data mining work for you.